after waiting this long to get their Pandoras I don't think people should suddenly be obligated to do work on top of that.
Heh heh .. I suppose its okay, after all this time, for the Pandora to have a fairly mediocre software base. Actually, no I don't: I'd like for the Pandora to have software that doesn't exist anywhere else. I want Pandora to be a fertile breeding ground for mad and delightful new apps. Ports of decades-old projects are one thing: Fresh projects designed for the hardware in front of you, explicitly, is another thing entirely.
Far more owners are developers than you'll see with almost any other platform.
For example, the Zii Egg was only sold 'to developers', but the known quantity of actual developer contribution after the devices hit the hands of the people who had ordered them was something like 10%, and a *lot* of people confessed to the fact that they were only buying them to be able to turn them around on EBay, or to be able to pose with the latest gadget, and so on, in case "it went big". In this day and age, anyone can call themselves a developer: but what matters is the final release. I really doubt a high percentage of current Pandora owners are hacking away at developing for it, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong by real statistics and not just feelings and hear-say, which is all we have to go on right now ..
I was pretty sure you'd say things like this in response. And I was pretty sure I wouldn't find it very convincing.
You're pretty sure about a lot of things, I have read.
You can test multiplayer against a computer and other people with Pandoras. I know I do.
Do you also then account for the differences in i/o throughput on your PC, somehow? Do you know other Pandora people in your neighborhood? Luck you, here in Vienna I don't know another single Pandora owner.
Not that I feel like arguing you with you particularly, but I come from a world where you always test first and foremost on your target hardware and never elsewhere, and thats a good methodology for ensuring your stuff works. Since I work mostly on safety-critical and realtime systems, I abhor the idea of testing new code on non-standard hardware. Test, always, on your target device, is my rule and it works quite well when it comes time to supporting your end users ..
You can keep experimental OS images on different SD cards, or at any rate off NAND.
Of course, and you can also just hack SDL-based projects on some other platform and gain a lot of glory from doing a port here and there too, but in my case I want to be able to contribute to the Base OS while also working on my user space apps for music, without interruption and interference. Sometimes, things I do at the kernel level will definitely prevent progress at the user-space development level, so having two Pandoras helps with that: one can be off in la-la-land while the other still has a running version of the latest build.
Decades of experience has led to the policy of maintaining different hardware configurations for these two realms, and its worked quite well so far .. so ..
And the music making argument I'm not even following.
When you have a softsynth and want to see that it syncs well with another copy of the softsynth running on another Pandora, over the Pandora Wifi link itself and not 'an approximation of it', its best to have two complete instances of the hardware to test against, lest you run around trying to work out why you're getting better throughput for the job on the mega-PC in comparison to the real hardware you're intending to target .. I'm sure if you'd thought about that, you'd understand.
But whats your point? I'm a bad person for having two Pandoras when there are developers out there who haven't gotten theirs yet? I ordered and paid for two when I put my finger in the pie in the first few minutes of online ordering going live, so.. whats the problem there? Shall I not use the onboard compiler too, because there are developers out there who can't do that yet, lol ..
So yeah, maybe it helps you some measurable amount - but you seriously think it helps production more for you to have two than another decent dev to have one instead? Because I don't. And I continue to say that with certainty.
Like I say, you have certainty on a lot of things but certainty isn't the only way to paint the bike shed .. I don't think you're really being honest in looking at my situation: I have two Pandoras because it supports my development efforts, and all I really want to do with the Pandora is develop cool, new, things for it .. so yeah, I got two to help with that, and in fact having two Pandoras definitely helps when I need to switch on new things, test them, verify against a known end-user configuration, and so on .. On one Pandora right now, for example, I have a custom kernel configured more specifically for audio production (realtime, tweaks) and I know for example from this that my softsynth runs better on that environment than on the Base OS currently shipping to customers, and it sure is a lot easier to compare the differences in performance when both cases are clearly represented by running hardware, side-by-side ..
Do you want buzz, or do you want stuff to actually get done?
I'd like to hear what other developers are doing to bring original stuff to the Pandora sphere. I'm sure they're out there, we just don't hear that much about it. Am I responsible for that with all my ridiculous rants? Possibly. Are you responsible for it with your "certainty" about things? Possibly. Either way, I hope other developers will tell us about the interesting things they're doing with their Pandoras, nevertheless, and to that end I resolve to stop ranting about things, certainly ..
